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The worst thing was that Red didn't remember.
Red remembered the aftermath, of course; those horrifying few seconds where he could feel, could see, but something was pulling his body around like a puppet on strings, throwing himself across File Explorer (when did he get there, he thought he was standing on a cobblestone floor on the taskbar and shades of blue had coloured the side of his vision but now it was a stark white and what happened), then that moment of painful clarity where he could still see dark tinges in his peripheral, could still feel phantom hands crawling across his mind, then the horrifying realisation, as he stared at his injured friends, that it was himself who caused this.
She also recalled, far more clearly, her newfound space while going about her day, those terrible, horrible, furtive looks on the faces of her friends as they flinched back when she walked wrong, then the maybe-even-worse apologetic grins as they told her, in their own ways, no no it’s fine that wasn’t your fault, but it was, it was, it was.
Red breathed in, out, and, for what felt like the hundredth time but was probably about the fifth, looked around the room where he had set himself up— well, room was a little bit of a stretch. The white wall of the folder, buried far into others of its kind like some kind of nesting doll, seemed to stretch far above his head, even though Red had taken the opportunity to shrink the window as small as he could manage without feeling claustrophobic (and wasn’t it messed up, that he didn’t get this way before… the incident, and he didn’t even know why). On the other side, another, bigger window— another folder, sue him, he had been and definitely still was panicking, and this one was where all the art went and surely, surely, it would not be closed for long enough for anyone to notice him hiding in the top corner of the screen.
Because Red wasn’t hiding, thank you. The rest of her friends weren’t out of harm’s way, not really, until she was restrained, boxed away, where even if she tried there was no way she could even touch them. She had told Blue, with the most convincing face she had managed since she had been free to leave that webpage, that she felt sick enough to quarantine herself in a way that usually she would never even think of doing, so that their good intentions would not stab them in the back someday when Red eventually would, whether she liked it or not. It was for the best.
It was for the best.
Red shifted on the spot. Already, the space was feeling too tight, too small, too much like that obsidian head that he didn’t remember, he didn’t remember and maybe it was always this difficult to breathe and he was just lying to himself that it wasn’t all this time. Outside, faintly, there was a shout, muffled by layers of windows. Green, likely. If he listened a little more closely, he could just about hear the recipient of said mock-anger— Orange, who was yelling back with the same fervour. (He wondered if they had even noticed that he was gone.) (He wondered if they cared, really, about their least favourite comic relief.)
Her hands were shaking, she realised, and if she had a mirror she would likely have a manic look on her face. This was to keep them safe, Red reminded herself, it was to keep herself from becoming someone not herself with white eyes and blocky skin and jolting movement and tearing her friends to pieces and killing them for real this time and not giving them at least the opportunity to prepare themselves for when she inevitably became that thing, again, and when that happened she wouldn’t even remember—
“Red?”
He looked up. His hands were clenched into fists, he suddenly realised, which he loosened painfully slowly. He forced his breathing to calm, his heart rate to drop from that spike he felt at the sound of that voice, because shit they weren’t supposed to find him here.
Because Yellow had found him. She dropped in from the top of the window, seeming to barely notice its size, or barrenness, or that it was File Explorer even though Red wasn’t likely to go there during normal circumstances.
“Red!” she said, breathless, as if she had ran to reach him, “I’m so glad I found you, I’m aware Blue said that you’re sick but he’s also bored of talking to me about Alan’s computer, and honestly I’m tired of being—”
And Red was also tired, something that sank deep into his bones, but that didn’t stop him from retorting “What, scared of me? You know you should be, Yels.”
Yellow stepped back, eyes wide and startled. “…Please elaborate?” she managed.
Red ran a hand down her face. She didn’t understand. “What do you mean, ‘please elaborate?’ I almost killed you, y’know, I don’t— I don’t fully know what happened, but you know it could happen again.”
Yellow seemed to be settling into her ‘lecture voice’, which was infuriating, but she was talking already. “Actually, whatever caused you to… want to cause harm was distinctly not you, Red. The effects stopped when the block went into the trash, so likely—”
“Likely.” Red giggled, more than a little hysterical. “Likely! Yellow, likely isn’t going to save you if— when something goes wrong.”
His hands were shaking again, legs jittery and bouncing on the plain floor. “I’m trying to keep you all safe. I’m in this stupid folder to keep you all safe. You don’t understand.”
Yellow jumped down, nearly tripping as she landed on the ground; she seemed distracted. She took a step forward. “Red, I—”
“You should be leaving, Yels.” A shaky intake of breath. “I’m going to— I’m going to hurt you, or Blue or Green or Orange or someone else and I— Yellow, please leave, I don’t—”
She paused. Yellow’s form, fidgeting on the spot in front of her, seemed blurred now. It took far too long for Red to realise that it was because of the tears running down her face. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, but no words came out. She saw her step forward. Red pushed her away.
“If I kill you when I’m like that,” she forced, out of a closing, tightening throat, “I won’t even know until it’s over.”